Code has always been the easy part

When I joined Etsy the team was two years into a rewrite chasing a more elegant architecture (actually two distinct incompatible elegant architectures), and hadn’t shipped a customer facing feature in that time. I like to say (and it may even be true) that stopping and pivoting the team to standardizing on PHP was critical to unlocking everything that came later at Etsy. After all, no one ever has to argue about what elegant PHP looks like.